Joint Chiefs Chairman's Tough Task Ahead

When he takes the oath of office next week, Barack Obama, a man with no military experience, will become commander in chief of a nation fighting two wars. So where will he turn for military advice? To the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the most senior officer in uniform and by law the president's principal military adviser.

He is Admiral Mike Mullen and 60 Minutes and CBS News correspondent David Martin spent eight days traveling with him to the frontlines of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as he prepared for this historic transition to a new president he had never even met until recently.

Mullen is in the middle of a two-year term as chairman, a position he was named to by President Bush. That makes him the only member of the new national security team who was not handpicked by Barack Obama.

Asked what he thinks of Obama, Mullen told Martin, "I thought he was very focused, he knew what he wanted to talk about."

"So the president-elect reaches out to you. How big a deal is that?" Martin asked.

"It's a huge deal as far as I'm concerned," Mullen replied. "I think any president, and as the commander in chief, the connection with the military is absolutely vital and so making that connection as early as possible and as solid as possible, I think is a huge deal."

Mullen will be serving a president who once called the war in Iraq "dumb" and made this promise over and over: "My first day in office I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in and I will give them a new mission and that is to end this war."

To advise the new president on what that will take, Mullen flew to Iraq just before Christmas. 60 Minutes went with him as he talked with battlefield commanders and Iraqi military leaders.

From the Green Zone in Baghdad, to a forward operating base in Tikrit, to an intense on-the-run briefing at an airbase in western Iraq, it was a firsthand look at just how difficult a pullout will be.

It's not just the 140,000 troops. It's the tons of equipment and acres of command centers built up over nearly six years of war - all of it to be brought home without triggering the collapse of Iraq's government. Mullen himself once said setting a timetable for withdrawal would be dangerous.

"2009 is going to be a huge year. And at the beginning of that year the new president has said he's going to call you in and tell you…to end the war in Iraq. Is that mission impossible?" Martin asked.

"No, I don't think it's mission impossible," Mullen said. "He's said very consistently that he wants to do so responsibly. Certainly, a responsible withdrawal, a responsible ending is, I think you know a very, very possible outcome here given what I've seen transpire over the last couple of years, and literally what I saw today walking the streets of Samarra."

Two years ago it would have been impossible for Mullen to walk down the streets of Samarra, where the bombing of the Golden Mosque touched off sectarian fighting that almost tore the country apart. It's still dangerous enough to require a phalanx of armed guards, but there's a new mayor, who Mullen met and congratulated.

And shops are open on a street that was once the epicenter of Iraq's civil war. The mosque, one of the holiest sites in Iraq, is being rebuilt.

"That strikes me as sort of the perfect symbol of where we are…in Iraq," Martin remarked.

"I don't disagree with that. I think that's a pretty good …description, yeah," Mullen said.

But he also agreed that there's a lot of work still ahead.

But when we flew further north it was a different story: Admiral Mullen was supposed to take another marketplace walk in Mosul but was told that with an entourage the size of his the chance of getting hit were 100 percent, so he never left the base.

But he and his wife Deborah could still roll out the chairman's holiday USO tour, bringing a little of "home sweet home" to troops on the frontlines.

After 48 hours in Iraq, Mullen pressed on to that other war, the one in Afghanistan, the one that worries him most.

There is the obligatory round of meetings in Kabul with President Karzai and Afghan military commanders, then a tour of the military academy.

But he's there to see the battlefield where too few troops are spread over too much ground. Local officials jump at the chance to ask America's top military officer for help.

"I'm so very pleased that a person of your caliber comes to Farah to meet with us," one provincial governor told Mullen with the help of a translator.

President-elect Obama has said years of occupation in Iraq have prevented the U.S. from doing what needs to be done in Afghanistan. And Mullen has warned publicly the U.S. is no longer winning the war against the Taliban.

Asked if he was trying to get people's attention, Mullen told Martin, "What I really was trying to do was call it exactly as I saw it."

"But those kind of words, 'we are not winning,' that's putting it very starkly in a way that will really register with the public," Martin remarked.

"Well, I said it because I believed it," Mullen said. "And I still believe it. And I think it represented exactly where we are."

"What about the commanders in the field? What do they think about you saying 'We are not winning?'" Martin asked.

"I think the level of violence in 2008 surprised us all. The sophistication of the tactics of the insurgency surprised us all. So I just don't think there was much daylight between us and - between myself and the commanders on the ground on this," Mullen explained.

Mullen visited Marines in outposts scattered across the barren reaches of western Afghanistan. He told them reinforcements are on the way.

"We're going to add forces to Afghanistan. We're going to add those forces over the next 12 to 18 months," he said.

Asked how many troops he's going to put into Afghanistan, Mullen said, "Well, I think the exact number isn't known. I talked yesterday about a range between 20,000 and 30,000."

"So we're gonna go from a current 32,000 up to as many as 60,000," Martin pointed out.

"We could, yeah," Mullen acknowledged.

Think about what he just said: the U.S. will double the number of troops in Afghanistan during the first year of the Obama administration and keep them there for his entire first term. The war in Afghanistan is likely to define the Obama presidency as much as Iraq defined the Bush administration.

At a place called Bakwa, where 80 Marines have scratched out a foothold deep in Taliban territory, Mullen is about as far away from the Pentagon as you can get.

This is his chance to break through the chain of command and talk to the grunts. He wants the troops to level with him. "You see it in a way that I can't. So I need help from you in seeing what's really going on. My life is full of information being provided to me that, you know, life is grand as if I have forgotten that problems are tough," he told the troops.

They tell him about an enemy which has a stranglehold local commerce and can hijack supply convoys almost at will. But they also want the low-down on the new president.

"I was wondering how do you think the change in presidency is gonna affect the war on terror in Afghanistan?" one Marine asked Mullen.

"We'll find out on the 20th of January very specifically, but I know that certainly is an area that he is going to focus on. So I think his arrival, his taking charge will in fact see us focus here more," he replied.

By talking to the troops, Mullen is trying to get out of the Pentagon bubble and into the real world. He's driven by a piece of advice in one of the letters he received when he was first promoted to admiral. "The line that I remember the most - from all those letters was 'Congratulations - just remember one thing: from now on you will always eat well and you'll never hear the truth again.' And that stuck with me," Mullen said.

Mullen spends 30 percent of his time on the road and there is no country he has visited more often than Pakistan, the last stop on his battlefield tour. Asked how many times he'd been in Pakistan, Mullen told Martin, "I think it's my 7th trip to Pakistan since February 8th meeting with General Kiyani, One time we met on one of our aircraft carriers off the coast."

"Does any other country compare with that?" Martin asked.

"Clearly Pakistan is equal, if not more important than any other country, right now because of the challenges that we have," Mullen said.

Specifically the terrorist safe havens along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, which the new president has said he will not tolerate. Fighters trained in Pakistan are crossing into Afghanistan and killing American soldiers.

"The sophistication of the attacks that are coming from the safe havens into Afghanistan have gone up dramatically. Small unit tactics, company level infantry, company level light tactics," Mullen explained.

"Are all those troops you're planning on putting into Afghanistan gonna make any difference if these safe havens continue to exist?" Martin asked.

"The safe havens gotta be shut down to a level where it doesn't have the effect that it's having now and in the long run, if that is not done then additional troops are not gonna have that big an impact," Mullen said.

Michael Glenn Mullen grew up in Los Angeles, the son of Hollywood press agents for stars like Ann Margaret and Jimmy Durante. But for the last 43 years he's lived a life of military discipline - which includes getting up at 4 a.m. to lift weights.

He is a Navy admiral who has spent most of his career at sea, about to advise a new president how to get out of the ground war in Iraq and deeper in to the ground war in Afghanistan. But back in that Pentagon bubble, he has advisors of his own.

Mullen took Martin for a short tour into a place called the "tank," where secret meetings are typically held.

The tank looks like any other conference room, but it is where the Joint Chiefs of Staff - the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard - meet with the chairman.

Asked if there was apprehension about this particular president-elect within the military, Mullen told Martin, "I haven't sensed that. What's really important about us and the military is that we stay neutral, that we remain apolitical. We work for whoever the president is. And all of us in the military will do that faithfully to support President Bush until the 20th of January. And we'll do the same thing for President-elect Obama once he gets into the position."

The two may not always see eye to eye, especially when it comes to setting a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, but there's no doubt in Mullen's mind who has the final say. "When President-elect Obama gets in and he says, 'Here's the decision,' the United States military, led by me, is gonna march off and execute that decision," Mullen said.

"So, if the commander in chief says 'Do it,' you do it?" Martin asked.

"Absolutely," Mullen replied.

Produced by Mary Walsh